Startup Aims to Shake Wired, Wireless Foundation

Many engineers try to use existing technical building blocks in better ways. MagnaCom is proposing an entirely new foundation.

The Southern California startup has been quietly working on a substitute for QAM, the acronym for part of the key technical underpinnings of wired and wireless offerings such as cable and satellite TV, DSL, 4G cellular and Wi-FI. In the world of communications, it’s akin to suggesting an alternative for air.

But MagnaCom CEO Yossi Cohen says the long odds didn’t deter Amir Eliaz, an Israeli communications scientist who challenged the orthodoxy of experts dating back to the 1950s. “He said, ‘you guys have got it all wrong.’”

QAM, which stands for quadrature amplitude modulation, is a scheme for encapsulating information to convey it using what engineers called carrier waves. Companies keep finding ways to improve QAM’s performance, Cohen says, but not as fast as needs are growing for greater wireless speed, capacity and energy-efficiency.

MagnaCom is proposing an alternative called wave modulation, which it shortens into WAM. Where QAM is bi-directional, using two carrier waves, Cohen says Eliaz developed a “multi-dimensional constellation” that has inherent advantages. It’s a “non-linear” technology, he adds, behaving differently than components like a radio amplifier that will only boost a signal so much before topping out.

So what? Cohen says the technology can bring a 10 decibel improvement in the gain of a signal, translating into benefits like a 400% improvement in the range of a technology like Wi-Fi.

It also can reduce communications power requirements by up to 50%, he says, and require half the radio spectrum to send a given amount of data–or deliver twice the bits in the same chunk of the airwaves. That’s a big deal as carriers scramble to handle the demands to deliver more data without costly investments in bandwidth, Cohen says.

Just as importantly, he adds, the technology requires only a small addition to existing chip circuitry in a mobile gadget, while keeping the same antennas and radio components. A WAM-equipped phone, in other words, could still connect to QAM networks–just like most 4G phones are “backward-compatible” to 3G networks.

Rather than make hardware itself, MagnaCom plans to make money by licensing its technology to others. Cohen, a veteran of Broadcom and Motorola Mobility, concedes the company faces an uphill job in convincing people to consider such a fundamental change.

To start that process, the Laguna Niguel, Calif., company plans to give the first public demonstration of the technology at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in early January.

“There is a level of skepticism, which is exactly what we expected there to be,” Cohen says. “People have just basically said ‘show me,’ and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”